1. Technical Field
The present invention relates, generally, to aircraft cockpit displays and, more particularly, to graphical methods for displaying information in a computer user interface.
2. Background Information
Aircraft flight displays continue to advance in sophistication, achieving increasingly higher levels of information density and, consequently, presenting a greater amount of visual information to be perceived and understood by the operator. In many applications, it is important that visual displays provide a proper cognitive mapping between what the operator is trying to achieve and the information available to accomplish the task. As a result, such systems increasingly utilize human-factor design principles in order to build instrumentation and controls that work cooperatively with human operators. Accordingly, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and many other governmental regulatory agencies have promulgated a number of standards and advisory circulars relating to flight instrumentation. More particularly, Title 14 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) Part 25, Sec. 25.1321 et seq. provides guidelines for arrangement and visibility of instruments, warning lights, indicators, and the like. Similarly, detailed guidelines related to electronic displays can be found in FAA Advisory Circular 20-88A, Guidelines on the Marking of Aircraft Powerplant Instruments (September 1985).
Although cockpit user interfaces have improved dramatically in recent years, additional improvements in user friendliness and ease-of-use would be welcome. For example, in current generation aircraft, flight plan entry and editing continues to be performed using cumbersome, text-based techniques which have not changed significantly in the decade. As a result, flight crews frequently complain that current flight management systems (FMS) are non-intuitive, difficult to interpret, and require too much heads-down time. Indeed, due to the high cockpit workload involved, many flight crews abandon the FMS altogether, choosing instead to fly the aircraft using the autopilot. Improvements in FMS user interfaces would therefore be welcomed, as would improvements in many cockpit interfaces, such as those used for on-screen utility control of valves, pumps, temperature settings, option selections and the like. Even in graphical-based techniques for flight planning and control, enhancements and improvements in user interfaces would allow for increasingly intuitive pilot interaction.
Methods are therefore desired to improve the efficiency and user-friendliness of controller interaction/flight planning operations. In particular, the operation and control of pilot cursor operations may be improved.
The present invention includes systems and methods which overcome the shortcomings of the prior art by providing improved control of cursor commands directed by a user (such as a pilot). Various embodiments of the invention include such user interface cursor control enhancements as caging, snapping, hysteresis, combinations of xe2x80x98relativexe2x80x99 and xe2x80x98absolutexe2x80x99 cursor data, integration of discrete button movement with continuous cursor movement, and different gain algorithms. The invention may be implemented in a cockpit display, a flight simulator, a graphical flight planning application, or in any other application having a graphical user interface.